Keystones: Altered Destinies Read online

  Jonny had driven through the night and made it to Nairobi, Kenya. He couldn’t believe the news. Weird things had been happening to people all over the world. He’d thought about going to the hospital, but what was he going to say? Liquid sprayed out of his hands? No. It hadn’t happened again, and he didn’t have a shred of evidence. Even with the general strangeness that pervaded the world, his story was odd.

  He’d feel better, he decided, once he rode the local Elevator to his home in the Terra Rings.

  The Elevator was an unimpressive pair of cables spaced two hundred meters apart that ended a few dozen meters off the ground and stretched far into space. All of the Elevators maintained geostationary orbit at their various equatorial locations. They were the longest man-made structures ever constructed.

  Jonny stood back and looked at the terminal building. Elevators came down one cable; cargo was unloaded or people disembarked; then the empty Elevator would be attached to the upwards cable and loaded with new cargo or people.

  From the outside all one saw was a massive and multistoried room that had been designed with token gestures to aerodynamics. New Elevators came down the cable every hour. The complex and involved process of switching them from one cable to another was hidden from sight by the building.

  Ring Security was the usual banal drill. Jonny walked through a series of lines where biometric scanners verified his Secure Identity and screened for weapons or explosives. He was also required to use his Uplink to verify his booking. Next Jonny joined the group of people waiting for an Elevator.

  Elevators’ movement was slow when in the Earth’s atmosphere, but they sped up once air friction ceased to be an issue. Each of the Elevators was standard issue. Passenger areas ranged from coach to first class.

  Jonny grumbled at the expense of a first-class ticket as he paid his coach fare. He could justify the expense of a safari but not that of a more comfortable seat on the way home.

  He watched the news on his Uplink as the Elevator ascended. As far as the news stations were concerned, the only story worth reporting was about the Keystones that had sprung up everywhere.

  As he flipped through channels, the theme remained the same. Changing tactics, Jonny looked up some research that had been done on the Keystone phenomenon before it had become widespread.

  The excited chatter of other passengers interrupted his investigation. Looking around, Jonny saw that they were all pointing at the window. Tourists, thought Jonny. The first time up or down the Elevator, people were always excited by the view. Then the rat caught his eye.

  The Elevator was over two thousand kilometers into space, and there was a rat scurrying around on the outside of the smooth, zero-friction glass. It took one slow step after another while failing to do other more normal things, like fall or freeze.

  Jonny’s Uplink tumbled from his fingers. He looked around the cabin and asked, “Is anyone filming this?”

  People either continued to stare at the rat or ignored his question. That was fine with him. He predicted that this was going to be a profitable video.

  The rodent continued to make its way across the glass. It was a lean rat, perhaps ten centimeters long, with a reddish coat, and it appeared to be immune to the vacuum of space.

  He rummaged through his bags and found the camera that he had bought for his safari. Activating it, he zoomed in on the rat moving forward at a steady pace, though Jonny couldn’t figure out how it was holding on to zero-friction glass. He also didn’t care. He wasn’t going to question his good fortune. Once he had thirty seconds of footage, he sent out bid requests to every news agency he could reach.

  Bids took less than a minute to start coming in. The dollar amounts tickled Jonny’s sense of capitalist competition.

  Implications

  Back from the impound lot and the brief vigil he’d spent over his car, Deklan became one with his coma-inducing couch. When you sat in it, you lost all incentive to move. It was also old, having been rehabilitated and recovered on more than one occasion. It was possible that every portion of it had been replaced several times. In that sense the couch matched the rest of his possessions in the apartment. Almost nothing was new. Even the things that stamped the place as uniquely his were the posters of cars that dated from before the turn of the century.

  In his inertia Deklan was preoccupied with thinking of a way to test his Keystone ability that didn’t involve blood, pain, death, or dismemberment.

  To fill in the gaps he called several scrap yards to see how much he could get for his wrecked car. Because he was on the financial brink, any extra revenue would help. He could have sought an insurance reimbursement, but he was worried an assessment might reveal that it was his blood in the car, a fact that he wanted to keep from people’s attention.

  His reflections were interrupted by a loud yowl from Mittens, who was pawing at the door. Deklan looked at the cat, then at the door. He pointed toward the hallway to the kitchen. “Your litter box is that way,” he said. “Now be quiet, you irritating vagrant.”

  Bored by the behavior of his cat, Deklan turned to his TV for diversion. There was a rodent on the screen, not a significant improvement. Despite his general exhaustion, something nagged at Deklan, so he focused on what he was seeing. The rat was in space. Life continued to grow stranger. It was a live broadcast from an Elevator out of Nairobi.

  A splintering noise from the vestibule of his apartment drew his attention away from the screen. He sprinted to the front door, or what was left of it.

  The door had been one of the nicer features of his apartment—old and sturdy, made of paneled oak, with whorls in the grain. It now was splintered and dangled from ruined hinges. A large section of the bottom right quadrant was gone, and cracks radiated out from there.

  Through the gaping hole in his door he could see Mittens disemboweling the neighbor’s Great Dane.

  Deklan grabbed the doorknob, but when he pulled it came free, and the entire locking mechanism fell to the floor. Dropping the handle, he seized the door itself and yanked it open.

  His neighbor, Paige, was standing there screaming in pain at the myriad splinters in her skin. Deklan lunged toward Mittens, the only part of the situation he felt capable of handling at the moment.

  Mittens was in the process of killing an animal that outweighed her by at least a factor of twenty. As his hands grabbed her fur, she turned and slashed at Deklan, her claws raking his right forearm. He’d never liked that cat. Corralling her by the scruff of her neck, he dragged her away from the injured canine.

  Paige collected herself enough to run to her dog. “Brownie! Brownie, are you okay? Oh God, what did your cat do to my Brownie? You’re a monster!”

  Deklan stopped, still holding Mittens. “Do you want help in getting Brownie to the vet?” he asked.

  Paige pointed at him with one shaking hand. “No! Take your psycho cat and get the hell away from me!”

  Ignoring her, Deklan ran into his apartment with Mittens swaying from his fist. He threw her into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and locked her in. Running back to Brownie, he knelt by the dog and tried to hold its stomach shut as he placed the towel on top of the wound.

  Meanwhile, in the back of his mind, Deklan was trying to process what Mittens had done. How had she gotten out into the hallway? How had his door been smashed? How had Mittens come out the winner in a physical confrontation with a full-grown Great Dane?

  Paige was still yelling at him. “Paige!” he shouted. When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her hands and pressed them down over the towel on Brownie’s belly before running back into his apartment for his trolley. He brought it out to the hallway and managed to explain to Paige that they needed to use it to get Brownie into the elevator, down to her car, and from there to the vet.

  Deklan loaded the whimpering dog onto the trolley and wheeled it to the elevator. “Are you okay to drive?” he asked Paige.

  “Yes, I’m fine,” she snapped, but he understood her anger. The whole thing
didn’t make sense. He was still at a loss to comprehend how Mittens had injured the dog at all, let alone ripped its stomach open. His front door was a problem that he pushed to the back of his mind.

  Deklan piled into the back seat of the car with Brownie, holding the towel in place as Paige slid behind the wheel.

  Joy

  Sebastian spiraled through the air. Above him was brilliant blue sky marred only by the occasional alabaster cloud. He passed over a thermal and used it to spiral up over the course of a few minutes. He still hadn’t quite figured out how to find them, but whenever he did he used them for the free lift. He spiraled higher and higher, watching as the city below became a toy-like display. He loved to do this, not for itself but for what came next.

  He leveled off and then banked into a steep dive back down to the city. Wind roared in his ears as he grinned widely. There was no flapping, no work, just the adrenaline rush of pure speed.

  Beneath him buildings rushed by. At this pace he could cross the entire metropolis in a matter of minutes. He’d raced a few other fliers who indulged in the same hobby, but of all of them he seemed to be the most addicted to the experience. Yesterday the most exciting thing in his life had been his collection of geodes from all over the world. Today he couldn’t imagine sitting with them and looking at a specimen under a microscope.

  He had never known so pure a happiness as flying. Whereas before acquiring his wings he had been drawn to quiet study and solitary activities, he now wanted nothing more than to spend every minute in the sky. Inhaling deeply, he dove toward the pointing pedestrians below and pulled up at the last moment, skimming along less than six meters off the ground.

  Many different types of Keystone could fly. Most did so without wings, currents of energy trailing behind their bodies or air sacs inflated. Others flew without any obvious method of flight.

  Sebastian swooped by one airborne Keystone of the slower variety who was kept aloft by air sacs. He barely had time to take in her appearance as he sped by: hair so red that he doubted it was natural, unless it had been a gift from The Sweep, and two massive air sacs that stretched from wrist to ankle. He wondered how she steered, but perhaps she didn’t. If she were moving in any direction other than up and down, she certainly wasn’t doing so with any speed. In fact, he had yet to encounter an air-sac flyer who levitated at more than a crawl. Walking would have been faster for most of them, but Sebastian couldn’t fault the woman for wanting to fly no matter in how limited a fashion. Regardless of how they flew, every Keystone that Sebastian saw loved the experience.

  Keystones with wings were the rarest form of flyer, and even among those with wings there was variety—scaled, leathery, furry. Sebastian took a quiet pleasure in being the only Keystone aloft with the feathered wings of a bird of prey.

  The aerial maneuver he enjoyed most was that of swooping down between buildings. He experienced a giddy pleasure when birds scattered before him as he passed. He was living a childhood fantasy. Each beat of his wings was a fresh surge of joy.

  As he rolled in the air, an acrobatic stunt that he wouldn’t have tried a day earlier, he saw below him a small pack of stray dogs. They were approaching a parked car near which two people struggled to manage what looked like an injured dog.

  Concern suspended Sebastian’s upbeat mood as he surveyed the scene. The stray dogs looked feral and predatory. The two people’s attention was focused on the animal in their care. They were completely unaware of the threat at hand.

  Suddenly one of the slavering canine’s lunged toward the man.

  Sebastian saw the attack and launched into a power dive. Wings tucked to his sides, his profile imitating an arrow in flight, he gained speed and intercepted the next two dogs as they dove at their intended prey.

  The pair of dogs bounced off a solid wall of feathers. Snapping their jaws, they turned, searching for Sebastian.

  First Attack

  Distracted by thoughts of Mittens, it was all Deklan could do to help Brownie. Paige’s driving didn’t make it any easier. She’d disabled the auto-drive, which was always a bad idea, if Deklan’s morgue visit was anything to go by. In addition, she was weaving in and out of traffic, honking her horn, and coming within a hair’s width of hitting a car every half block. Regardless of what kind of driver she was at other times, concern for Brownie had her breaking every traffic law on the books. Given his recent crash, Deklan found this unsettling.

  After this harrowing drive they arrived at the vet’s office, where Paige ran ahead to get the door while Deklan backed out of the car cradling Brownie. He was surprised by growling sounds around him. His attention now refocused, he saw three mangy dogs in a semi-circle behind him. With lips curled back, tails down, and hair bristling, their body language suggested that he was a possible menu item.

  The lead dog lunged at Deklan. His arms still filled with the injured Great Dane, he was incapable of dodging the attack and let out an involuntary scream as the stray latched onto his right leg.

  Its teeth buried in Deklan’s thigh, the attacking dog jerked its head, further tearing the wound. The initial bite had been almost painless, but with the mangling of his flesh came a searing pain. Balancing Brownie with his left arm, Deklan reached down to beat the stray’s head with his right. His fist stung with each impact against the dog’s head while having no obvious effect other than the thud of contact. The dog simply ignored his ineffectual blows and continued to maul him.

  Gritting his teeth, Deklan slid Brownie back into the car, each moment of gentle care costing him in the currency of pain. The second Brownie was free of his hands, he turned his full attention to the frenzied animal tearing into his leg. Deklan seized the dog’s head with both of his hands and twisted its neck until a sickening crack from the vertebrae indicated that he had killed the animal.

  With the immediate threat eliminated, Deklan looked at his leg. More alarming than the pain was the scarlet expanse that stained his pants. He leaned against the car to take the weight off his leg, while realizing that he needed to protect himself from the remaining animals.

  When he turned in their direction, he was astonished to see a man with massive wings defending him from two more dogs.

  Paige, followed by the vet, chose that moment to come back outside to this changed tableau. Deklan was leaning against her car, bleeding profusely from a serious wound, with a dead dog at his feet and an unexplained Keystone standing between him and two more approaching assailants.

  Furling his wings onto his shoulders, the man turned just enough that he so that he could lash out with his left wing, slapping both dogs over and over again. Yipping, they soon relinquished the field of combat.

  His mysterious rescuer knelt down to look at Deklan. Up close the winged man looked dazed and a bit surprised. “I’m Sebastian,” he said. “Are you alright?”

  Deklan examined his leg more closely. It was a bloody mess and beginning to swell. The pain was less than he expected but still considerable. “No, I don’t think so. Can you help me inside?”

  Paige and the vet ran to the two men. “Is Brownie okay?” she asked.

  Deklan spoke around the pain from his throbbing injury. “Yes, I put Brownie back in the car.” He then looked at the vet, a pretty brunette with her hair pulled into a bun and wearing a white coat. She at least was paying more attention to him than to Brownie. “Do you have any disinfectant?” he asked. “Can I at least get this bandaged here?”

  Peering through her glasses at Deklan’s wound, the vet replied, “Yes. Please come inside. I have some bandages, and I think today that I can waive any charge.”

  “Can you help me up?” Deklan asked Sebastian.

  Sebastian extended a hand to Deklan. “Sure. Hold my arm.”

  He pulled Deklan to his feet and handed him off to the vet. She accepted his weight as Sebastian curved his wings in front of his body and made an impromptu sling into which he placed the still suffering Brownie. He frowned as the dog bled onto his feathers.


  “What’s your name?” Deklan asked the vet as she helped him up the steps and into her office.

  “Susan Anthony.”

  “Nice to meet you, Susan. I’m Deklan Tobin.”

  The portion of Deklan’s leg visible through his torn pants was swelling and turning an alarming shade of black. He felt lightheaded as the vet guided him toward a metal table, his second in as many days.

  Paige fussed over Brownie as Sebastian angled himself to fit through the door. Sebastian gently slid the recumbent Brownie from his wings and onto another table in the same room. He left Brownie on the table in Paige’s care and washed fresh blood from his stained wings.

  Susan, meanwhile, had Deklan lying prone on a table. “I’m going to wash your wound now,” she said, “and it’s going to hurt.” She wasn’t asking him for permission; she was informing him of what was going to happen.

  After she ripped open his pants near the wound’s site, Susan sprayed water on the injury with a flexible hose. Deklan grimaced as every drop of water hit the wound like the point of a needle.

  “This isn’t normal for a dog bite,” commented his attendant. “Is it as painful as it looks?” She sounded perplexed.

  Deklan paused before he answered. His heart beat an uncomfortable tempo in his ears, like a drum, each thump sending a pulse of discomfort down his leg. “Worse.”

  “I’m going to pour disinfectant on this. It will sting.” She retrieved a bottle from the cupboard beneath the table. The liquid that came out was yellow and had an astringent smell. After the unpleasant rinsing of water over torn flesh, Deklan didn’t expect that the disinfectant could cause him to be any less comfortable. He was wrong. Already traumatized nerve endings sent stronger complaints to an abused brain. The bandages that were affixed next did little to appease his senses.

  With his eyes closed Deklan asked through clenched teeth, “Can we call an ambulance now?”